Some nice things about Adobe CS3 Part I

I actually have some nice things to say about the upgrade to Adobe CS3. This is not to say that I’m still not upset about not being able to upgrade Fireworks. That, I am still upset about, especially since it seems to be a much more robust product than the old Fireworks 8. I still have a few days left before the trail ends, and I’ve got to decide what to do. I will probably bit the bullet, return the copy and buy the full version, because it really is better.

And, they have improved other things as well. I love what they have done for InDesign.I have been using InDesign since it was first introduced, back when it was a joke, and no one was using it. The people using Quark would have laughed at it. But, I knew that Adobe wasn’t going to abandon it (although they had abandoned PageMaker, which I had also used from just about its first version). It was a horrid program up until about CS1.

The problem has always been, when you add more pallets, you add more clutter. Below is an example of what the pallet clutter looked like in CS2.

No, granted, I have a 20 inch screen, but even show, that isn’t enough to see it all. And I do want to see it all. I want to click around, and click back and forth, and see this and see that. It gets quite frustrating, and sometimes I have to make corrections from a marked up PDF, so I have to have the PDF on one side of the screen, and the InDesign on the other, and all these pallets get in the way, and I don’t want to close them. Whine, whine whine.

So this is why I am happy with the CS3 version of InDesign’s pallets. Now, you can have them all closed at once, or have them all open at once, or just have the one you are working on open one at a time, and close the other one, as you open the new one. I love it. It makes it work so much easier. I’m sure there are other things that I will learn that I like as I go along, but for now, this is a big step in the right direction.

The program seems to be farily stable, and I haven’t had any complaints about it. I don’t think I have used the new Quark more than once, and that was a legacy issue, that something had been started in Quark and hadn’t been translated over. Even though I own it, I don’t believe I will create in Quark again.

And, strange as it might be, I also like that finally, they are using letters to identify the programs, on the program icons. In the past, one feather was Photoshop and a butterfly was InDesign, and two feathers was Image Ready. Now, it is ID for InDesign and PS for Photoshop.

More on other observations about the suite tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 5:28 amand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.